


look me in the stars

by supinetothestars



Series: last night's clothes and tomorrow's dreams 'verse [1]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depression, Fogwell's Gym, Gen, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, One Shot, Young Matt Murdock, brief mention of suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21752731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supinetothestars/pseuds/supinetothestars
Summary: This morning, Matt is a pilgrim. He walks towards a light he cannot see, a God he cannot hear. His direction is aimless. He’s going nowhere except away from where he was. Matt can hear the city, but it’s muffled somehow, reaching him as a staticky blur of noise. The roar of tires against pavement screams at him from behind the shield of apathy, and he does not hear. He’s disconnected from this city, and is aware of the conversations around him only to disregard them. If he listens to anything around him, it’s only the road, to be sure he isn’t hit by a car.~~Matt wanders for a while, and contemplates.
Series: last night's clothes and tomorrow's dreams 'verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535831
Comments: 8
Kudos: 93





	look me in the stars

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place while Matt was a teenager at St Agnes shortly after Stick left.

"A voice said, look me in the stars

And tell me truly, men of earth,

If all the soul-and-body scars

Were not too much to pay for birth."

 _-A Question_ by Robert Frost

  
  


It’s about seven o’clock in the morning, and the city is waking up to a brisk autumn weekend. Apartment lights are flicking on, car engines revving in driveways. Weekend workers are chugging down coffee, or already on the road to work; the rest of the New York’s population is cursing themselves for forgetting to turn off early alarms the night before. As night shift workers return home, the wind kicks up burnished bronze leaves that drape over the grayscale concrete roads, haloing the pavement on gusts of chilly wind. 

Matt Murdock is not where he is supposed to be.

This morning, Matt is a pilgrim. He walks towards a light he cannot see, a God he cannot hear. His direction is aimless. He’s going nowhere except away from where he was. Matt can hear the city, but it’s muffled somehow, reaching him as a staticky blur of noise. The roar of tires against pavement screams at him from behind the shield of apathy, and he does not hear. He’s disconnected from this city, and is aware of the conversations around him only to disregard them. If he listens to anything around him, it’s only the road, to be sure he isn’t hit by a car.

Getting hit by a car is something Matt’s been contemplating. He would say it’s not suicidal ideation but an interest in literary parallels. Matt had died first in the act of saving, when he’d dived in front of a truck to save a man whose name he didn’t even know. It would lend his life a kind of parallel to die again in the same way, but as the victim and not the savior. If Matt stepped in front of a car, there would be no one to save him. No good Samaritan watching from the sidelines to intervene. These days, no one but God watches Matt Murdock. 

These days, God doesn’t seem in the business of saving.

Matt walks by a lot of old, decrepit buildings. Some of them seem haunted by memories of a life before- or of a life, period; what Matt has now hardly fits the description. He doesn’t always know exactly how he knew them, just that the old air rattling about in their stairwells smells of old cigarettes and melancholy. It’s a familiar scent.

At one point Matt finds himself standing in front of an apartment where he and his father used to live. Battlin’ Jack lived in a lot of places- like Matt, he was a wanderer, bouncing around and kicked out of apartment after apartment for missing the rent deadline. This place stands out because it was the last place. Matt wonders ghosts lurk behind those battered wooden apartment doors. He wonders if he’s the ghost, an remnant from an old life that stayed behind past its due.

Matt visits Central Park. The air there smells like the dirt and decay of rotting leaves being crumpled underfoot, but Matt prefers it to the chemical stink of city streets. He strolls about the pathways, his cane tapping out a rhythm against the cobblestones. At one point he finds himself in a garden with rose-tinted air, and at another, he takes a path so near the zoo that the stifling smell of manure turns him away. 

He ends up at a bench.

Any and all traces of Stick’s first lesson have been wiped clean by time. It’s a normal bench. A normal bench that makes it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to hear anything beyond echoing conversations from a summer’s day a thousand years past.

Matt sits down and listens; not to the gravelly voice of Stick that rants and raves in some dark corner of his mind, but to the people; a conversation muttered into underbrush miles away, a woman singing song lyrics into the silence into an ash grove across the park. 

He tries to feel some kind of emotion about this- the apartment, the bench. It doesn’t work; all he can summon is melancholy. Some part of Matt still mourns for the losses that should now be buried beneath the sands of time. 

An hour passes, and the city settles into the day’s routine. Matt continues his pilgrimage, but this time he knows where he’s going.

Fogwell’s Gym hasn’t changed. It’s as battered and rundown as ever. The door, on which perches a dead neon sign, is lined by tattered old posters.

Matt feels like he’s stepped back in time, into a day before this slow and painful death he lives. He’s alive, but only here- in this time, in this place.

He walks up to the wall, running his hand along ragged brick and then the worn posters. He can feel some letters on one, and makes out the word _missing_. The rest of the letters are too faded to distinguish.

Matt’s close to the wall besides the door, now, and leans his head against the brick to calm himself. He tries to ground himself in the present, focusing on the hum of cars behind him and the earth beneath his feet, but bits of the past keep slipping through the cracks in his resolve. He’s drowning in this sea of noise and rotting memories. The past is fighting with the present in the battleground of Matt’s consciousness. Stinging chemicals drip over his eyes and mouth and nose. All he can smell is something like burning flesh and he can almost see an imprint of the last thing he saw- _RAND ENTERPRISES_ , in big black letters, across the side of a truck. 

Someone’s cradling his head and speaking to him, but where Jack Murdock’s voice should be there’s only Stick, whose snarling words are lost under the roar of traffic that breaches all of Matt’s peace, even this shattered moment of a shattered life.

Matt comes to his senses an eternity later. Both his forearms and his skull are braced against the brick wall, his cane laying forgotten at his feet. The dripping on his face is from tears, not from chemicals, and the voice- now faded- was likely just the distant hissing of the river, warped into words by the ghosts inside Matt’s head.

He picks up his cane and wipes his face. It’s time to return to the orphanage, to his home and his hell, and only hope the nuns haven’t noticed his absence. As much of a Hell as St Agnes may be, Sister Margaret’s punishment is sure to be worse than any fee thought up by demons below. 

**Author's Note:**

> Concept prompted by a friend.


End file.
